SOTA Cosmos turntable
"Which way to the four o'clock tour?" It was already 10 minutes past the hour. I was late, but this was the last tour of the day. It would be a very long wait for the next one.
SOTA Star Sapphire turntable
The SOTA Sapphire was the first, and the most successful in terms of sales, of the new generation of high-end American turntables. As such, the SOTA can be viewed as leading this country's resurge ence of interest in high-quality turntable production. At the time of the SOTA's introduction in 1981, it was the only high-end turntable manufactured in the US. Since then American-made turntables have appeared from the likes of AR, Mapleknoll, Sonographe, and VPI.
Spiral Groove SG2 turntable
Photograph: TONEAudio Magazine
High-end audio exists at the intersection of art and science. Either discipline can produce a good product, but it takes both to create the very best. The Sonic Frontiers gear I auditioned many years ago, for example, was technically sound, nicely built, and sounded goodjust never as sublime as products from, say, Audio Research or VTL. On the other hand, an experienced, insightful designer such as Quicksilver's Michael Sanders can create wonderful products from humble circuits and parts, but be ultimately limited by the underlying technology. But when brilliant design, uncompromised execution, long experience, and artistry all come together, the results can be staggering.
Spotheim La Luce turntable and SpJ tonearm
The La Luce turntable's elegant form usually stops audiophiles dead in their tracks. Then comes a long, low "Wow." I'm hardly immune myself. And that's not even considering the sound, which has always been wonderful, as it was in the Joseph Audio/Cardas room at CES '98.
TechDAS Air Force V turntable
Unless a truly budget-priced Air Force model is in the works, the TechDAS turntable lineup now seems complete: The recently introduced Air Force Zero ($450,000) is at the top, and the "affordable" Air Force V ($19,500) is at the bottom. The Air Force One, Two, and III turntables, all available in both standard and Premium versions, sit in the costly middle.
There's no Air Force IV because in East Asia that number is considered bad luckwhich also explains why Japanese golfers shout "Six!" when someone hooks a shot into an adjacent fairway (joke alert).
TechDAS Air Force Zero turntable
The Air Force Zero turntable is very large for a turntable, but it is not as large as a house. At $450,000 for the base model, it does, however, cost as much as many houses and more than many others (footnote 1).
This observation will set off howling among some audio enthusiasts of a sort that never happens in the wine world, for instance, where well-heeled oenophiles routinely spend large sums for a short-lived thrill.
Technics Grand Class SL-1200/1210GR2 record player
In the early 1980s, I worked in a pop band playing AM radio hits, grooving behind my Yamaha drums and Zildjian cymbals as sweat drenched my body and my ears rang. We danced. We pranced. My shiny silk jumpsuit led upwards to a 2"-high afro, which women ran fingers through in hopes of finding contraband smokes ... Then overnight, everything changed.
At the beginning of the previous decade, Technics had released the SP-10, the first direct drive turntable. That was followed in short order by the SL-1100. Clive Campbell, aka Jamaican-American DJ Kool Herc, pioneered the simultaneous use of two Technics SL-1100s, initially at his sister's birthday party in the Bronx, inspiring "block parties" (rigging streetlamps for power) and hip-hop culture. Kool Herc isolated drumbeats from records by James Brown (with drummers Clyde Stubblefield and John "Jabo" Starks) and the Incredible Bongo Band (powered by master studio drummer Jim Gordon), among others, creating "breaks" for heated dance-floor partying. Soon, Lace Taylor (aka Afrika Bambaataa) and Grandmaster Flash (The Message) took Kool Herc's inventions into the mainstream, and hip-hop went global.
Technics SL-1200G turntable
People tend to believe that things are what they appear to be. This turned out to be the case in 2016, when Panasonic introduced the limited-edition Technics SL-1200GAE turntable. It appeared almost identical to an SL-1200arguably the best-selling and most loved record player series of all time, discontinued in 2010 after more than 30 yearsbut it cost a whopping $4000. The similar model designation didn't help stem the griping that Panasonic had made a "fancy" version of their legendary DJ turntable at six times the price of the original.
Technics SL-50C record player
Every first love leaves a strong impression. Hopefully it's a good one. Those of us who are phonography-positive fondly remember our first good record playing system, the first turntable-cartridge combo that let the music turn us on. Maybe it was simple, maybe it was fussy, maybe it was unreliable—no matter, it had that special ability to bring the excitement, beauty, and humanity out of the vinyl grooves, through our audio systems, and into our souls.
Thorens TD 124 DD Record Player
In 1957, Switzerland-based Thorens introduced the TD 124 turntable, a record player destined to become a classic. (TD is an initialism for tourne disque, French for turntable.)
A Thorens brochure from that same year itemized the TD 124's "11 main elements that result in 41 advantages." It noted the turntable's "strongly ribbed, solid chassis, crafted in cast aluminum," and its two-part platter including a "flywheel [subplatter], crafted in stabilized cast iron, [which] possesses excellent characteristics for the magnetic shielding of the drive system, as well as great inertia." Continuing, it lauded the TD 124's "main bearing, fitted with a 14mm spindle made of hardened, mirror-polished steel," its braking system, leveling dials, surface-mounted spirit level, and four "mushroom-shaped, rubber dampers [that] guarantee smooth suspension in a built-in frame as well as decoupling from the base."